Only Four Years of Undergrad

Something that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is the fact that 4-year colleges have a pretty high turnover rate. Students only spend four years here, which is not very long at all. It’s less than half a decade, and during a period of time where a lot of learning and growing is being done.

This means that with student leadership, it can feel very much so as though the blind are leading the blind. Because those in positions of more responsibility have been doing this for three years at the most, which is an incredibly short period of time. And it is hard to make super huge changes, when every year the new freshmen need to be taught and brought up to speed.

It can also be hard to conceptualizing issues and put them into a larger context, when all you have is a window of four years, you don’t know all of the history behind problems. Issues can arise and fester without people even being aware of them. Which is why it’s really beneficial to have people with institutional knowledge, because most individuals have no sense of the larger continuity within the community.

However this also means that there is constantly an influx of new ideas. Which is not a power to be underestimated, when people are around for a long period of time, they can get stuck in the way that things have always been done. With old eyes leaving and new ones constantly coming in, there’s never a shortage of new perspectives and ideas. Which is why there is always so much change happening on college campuses.

Undergraduate colleges are a really unique environment. The high turnover rate means that there is constantly changes underway, but can also mean that there is a lack of remembrance. It is important to keep the two in balance, and hopefully those who reach their last few years at a college realize the limitations of their knowledge of the school. Because this can mean that they are ill-equipped to handle problems that arise, and fully address their causes.